David Goldberg

An early and prominent employee of Google, Georges Harik, recently made the assertion that pairs working together in startups are 20 times more productive than individuals working alone. The author has also personally experienced the boost of what is here termed pairwork in a university setting during the startup phase of several educational and interdisciplinary initiatives. The paper briefly explores pairwork in the history of technology and constructs both qualitative and little quantitative models of pairwork. The quantitative model under reasonable assumptions easily recovers Harik’s 20x boost. The paper also briefly examines the author’s recent experiences with pairwork in four interdisciplinary and educational initiatives.

This extended abstract critically exams the use of the terms "rigorous" and "soft" in the context of engineering modeling. Common usage of the terms is contrasted with Toulmin's notion of "reasonableness" and Schoen's notion of "reflective practice." The abstract continues by considering an economic model of models in engineering, suggesting that overly "rigorous" engineering practice may box itself into being unable to afford the models it values, thereby presenting a conundrum for the practice and teaching engineering that demands relaxation.

The chapter reviews key foundations and principles of the burgeoning discipline of executive or leadership coaching and explores how these relate to the practice, profession, and philosophy of engineering. In exploring and comparing objectives, approaches, cognitive preferences and future challenges of coaches and engineers, the authors identify a number of kindred properties between the two disciplines. This common ground would invite us to believe that engineering would naturally draw upon coaching for the development of its students, educators, and practitioners, but evidence shows that this is not the case. Although many late-stage engineers get coached upon reaching the C-suite or other high positions in the public or private sectors, early and mid-career engineers do not have ready access to the coaching support seen elsewhere. Equally, very few initiatives to integrate and tap into this resource are seen in the global engineering education system for academic leaders, educators, or engineering students in ways that would benefit future generations of engineers. This chapter aims at providing a possible explanation for this gap, whilst suggesting why and how coaching could possibly be the untapped resource that engineers may need to successfully meet the challenges and demands of today and tomorrow. The authors call on philosophers to join in the efforts, drawing out some key paths for collaboration and helpful future investigative questions.

This paper presented at WPE-2008 uses an industrial-based senior design as an opportunity to understand what what students don't learn in a fairly traditional cold war engineering curriculum. The paper identifies seven deficient skills: questioning, labeling, qualitative modeling, decomposing, visualizing/ideation, empirical testing, and communicating. The talk also identifies five reasons why engineers don't learn these things, and philosophy plays a prominent role in recifying the problem by aiding in providing conceptual clarity and offering alternative models of rigor.

For the inaugural Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering (WPE-2007), this abstract asks why engineers are turning now to philosophy. Upon reflection, philosophy and engineering are very different occupations, and engineering has rarely turned to philosophy in the long history of the systematic design and production of complex artifacts. After briefly examining events since World War 2, the extended abstract carries over Kuhn's explanation of the rise of philosophy of science during the intellectual tumult of relativity and quantum physics in the opening moments of the 20th century to the case of engineering in the early moments of the 21st century. Specifically, the paper argues that the crisis of the rapid pace of technological change, reflected in the centripetal forces of the O's (bio, nano, and info) may help explain increased interest in a philosophy of engineering at this time. The abstract concludes by citing a number of ways that philosophy may help clarify what otherwise might be confusing times.

The paper starts by reflecting on what senior engineering students don't know how to do when they confront a real-world project in an industrially sponsored senior design project. Seven, largely qualitatively, skills are found to be lacking: questioning, labeling, qualitatively modeling, decomposing, measuring, ideating, and communicating. These skills, some of the most important critical and creative thinking skills in the arsenal of modern civilization, are termed "the missing basics" and contrasted with what engineering faculty usually call "the basics." The paper critically examines the term "the basics" and other terms that are conceptual hurdles to fundamental reassessment of engineering education at this time. The paper concludes that the engineering academy is stuck in a Kuhnian paradigm born in the cold war, that the reflexive belief in the superiority of math, science, and engineering science to the exclusion of other topics is not itself scientific, and that the use of tired code words is not an argument or a rational defense of a paradigm that may have outlived its usefulness. The paper concludes by highlighting the role philosophy can play in clearing away the conceptual confusion, thereby permitting a more reasoned conversation on the needs of engineering education in our times.

This paper follows a paper by Mitcham and considers whether engineering is among a group of occupations he calls philosophically weak, in the sense that engineering does not aspire to good-in-themselves ideals as do medicine and law. The paper agrees that engineering is philosophically weak, but in the different sense that engineering is not as reflective upon its nature and place in the world as some other professions. The paper recovers Mitcham's distinction by consider the institutional complexity of a given occupation, suggesting that engineering's practice in the context of complex institutional arrangements precludes the relative ethical simplicity of such occupations as medicine and law.

Building on the breakthrough text Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda, this book offers 30 chapters covering conceptual and substantive developments in the philosophy of engineering, along with a series of critical reflections by engineering practitioners. The volume demonstrates how reflective engineering can contribute to a better understanding of engineering identity and explores how integrating engineering and philosophy could lead to innovation in engineering methods, design and education. The volume is divided into reflections on practice, principles and process, each of which challenges prevalent assumptions and commitments within engineering and philosophy. The volume explores the ontological and epistemological dimensions of engineering and exposes the falsity of the commonly held belief that the field is simply the application of science knowledge to problem solving. Above all, the perspectives collected here demonstrate the value of a constructive dialogue between engineering and philosophy and show how collaboration between the disciplines casts light on longstanding problems from both sides. The chapters in this volume are from a diverse and international body of authors, including philosophers and engineers, and represent a highly select group of papers originally presented in three different conferences. These are the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering held at the Royal Academy of Engineering; the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands; and the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology, held in Golden, Colorado at the Colorado School of Mines.

Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence has traditionally been understood according to two primary interpretations: the cosmological and hypothetical. Those who opt for the cosmological suggest that recurrence is a factual, almost scientific, account of the circularity of both time and events. In opposition, Magnus, and those who accept the hypothetical position, offer circularity as an attitudinal approach to existence. This article argues that both understandings are suspect when confronted with the remainder of Nietzschean thought. As an alternative I will suggest that recurrence can only be grasped in the remainder can only be grasped in the recognition of the Moment' as the what' of the return